How to Avoid Being Wrong About the 2022 Midterms

For months now we've been hearing that the 2022 midterms are going to be a bloodbath for Democrats (or a shellacking, depending on your choice of words). Those claims are often accompanied by statements about how liberals have lost the culture wars, especially after Republican Glenn Youngkin's 2021 victory in Virginia. 

But I'd be willing to bet that none of the pundits making those claims saw this coming:

The [Wason Center for Civic Leadership] poll finds that Virginia voters are not on board with Youngkin’s crusade against critical race theory...Slightly more than a third of voters (35 percent) support a ban on teaching critical race theory in public schools, while 57 percent oppose such a ban.

Similarly, nearly two-thirds of voters (63 percent) support teaching “how racism continues to impact American society” while one-third (33 percent) oppose such teaching, according to the poll.

The poll’s findings also undercut the law that makes masks optional in public schools, finding that 56 percent of voters think a decision about masks in schools should be based on health data and experts, while 41 percent think it should be left up to parents.

Those numbers go a long way towards explaining the fact that the same poll found Youngkin's favorable ratings under water (41% approve and 43% disapprove) after less than two months in office. As it turns out, "Virginia voters seem to be to the left of Youngkin on many of his most high-profile issues." 

That raises the question of whether or not Democrats have lost the so-called "culture wars" - at least in a swing state like Virginia. Immediately after that election, we were bombarded with stories about how it was angry parents who revolted against Democrats. But the data firm TargetSmart recently did a deep dive into the numbers and found something very interesting: a "silver surge."

Republicans rode a "silver surge" to victory in VA last year. Senior turnout surged to unprecedented levels - somewhat shockingly, more voters over the age of 75 voted in the 2021 election than have in any VA election other than 2020. Turnout among voters age 75 or older increased by 59%, relative to 2017...

While it is certainly possible that school closures motivated these seniors to vote, this "silver surge" does seem to undermine the narrative that the VA election was centrally about schools.

We may never know what really happened in Virginia because I doubt that media outlets and polling firms will do focus groups with Virginia seniors (like they did with white moms) to find out what motivated them to turn out in such huge numbers. The narrative that took hold immediately after the election has already been baked into the assumptions that are being used to predict the outcome of the 2022 midterms, which means they'll probably be wrong.

At this point, I'm ready to call a moratorium on whatever becomes the dominant narrative in the immediate aftermath of an election. I suspect that what happens is that people gravitate to data that supports the assumptions they had prior to the votes being counted. That's why those initial takes are almost always eventually proven wrong. One need only look at how "economic anxiety" quickly became the reason so many white people voted for Trump in 2016. Eventually we learned that race and religion (ie, Christian nationalism) were much bigger factors.